The maxima package in karmic is damaged. Solving easy quadratic equations results in an Error-message.

[gleon]

The Software package for the computer algebra system "maxima" is damaged in karmic koala. E.g. maxima is producing errors on simple quadratic equations (in terminal mode). For example: x²-2*x-2=0
I know, that there's a "healthy" wxmaxima package, which can be used instead of the current damaged one: http://zeus.nyf.hu/~blahota/linux/ (I asked the developpers of wxmaxima). But in this version, there are missing some usefull buttons.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Mar 5 14:39:04 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: yelp 2.28.0-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-19.56-generic
SourcePackage: yelp
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-19-generic i686

[James P. Carter (jpcarter)]

I have changed the package to maxima.

[Vikram Dhillon (dhillon-v10)]

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On 03/05/2010 12:44 PM, James P. Carter wrote:
> I have changed the package to maxima.
>
> ** Package changed: ubuntu => maxima (Ubuntu)
>

Confirming this one, I experience it too, not only that, doing partial
integration does the same thing.

 status confirmed

- --
Regards,
Vikram Dhillon

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[Jeff Norden (jeff-math)]

I'm also affected by this bug. Not just for myself - I'm using maxima with the calculus classes that I teach, and I have some students that use Ubuntu. Giving complex directions for installing maxima from some other web site is not a good solution for them. It seems that this has been fixed for lucid already, but given how badly broken Karmic's version is, I really think that would be good to release the 5.20 version for Karmic as well.

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Thank you for reporting this and helping to make ubuntu better. This bug has already been reported upstream:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2924666&group_id=4933&atid=104933

From the author's comments [1], it appears that this bug is with broken libraries that maxima depends on or a broken compilation. If someone has time, please try the following:

1) rebuilding the karmic packages in a karmic ppa and see if that works (if it does, we'd need an SRU to rebuild maxima)
2) build the lucid package in a karmic ppa and see if it works (if that works, we can use the ppa as a work around, but an SRU might be too difficult since there are significant changes from karmic--> lucid's version)

I only have lucid systems, so I can set up the ppas for testing, but I won't be able to test that easily (it'll take a while to set up a VM for karmic)

[1] "Of course, Maxima can solve this equation and Maxima has no problem to run
on Ubuntu 9.10. It is not a problem of Maxima.

From the build_info I can see that you are using an Ubuntu package. It is
a known problem that this Ubuntu package does not work.

Get Ubuntu to provide a working version or try a version from another
source e.g. http://zeus.nyf.hu/~blahota/maxima.

Closing this bug report as invalid.

Dieter Kaiser"

[elrond (elrond.)]

I've marked this bug as duplicate of 303587. If incorrect, please remove duplicate